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| A tribute to moral and theological pygmies, illiterates, and American Dumb Asses. Calling them what they are is the beginning of change. E.g. the first step in AA. Recognizing you are what you are, or, in this case, that you are a moral and theological man-baby. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-defining-religious-liberty-down.html
Defining Religious Liberty Down
By ROSS DOUTHAT
THE words “freedom of belief” do not appear in the
First Amendment. Nor do the words “freedom of worship.” Instead, the Bill of
Rights guarantees Americans something that its authors called “the free
exercise” of religion.
It’s a significant choice of words,
because it suggests a recognition that religious faith cannot be reduced to a
purely private or individual affair. Most religious communities conceive of
themselves as peoples or families, and the requirements of most faiths extend
well beyond attendance at a sabbath service — encompassing charity and
activism, education and missionary efforts, and other “exercises” that any
guarantee of religious freedom must protect.
I cannot improve upon the way the first
lady of the United States explained this issue, speaking recently to a
conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up
on Sunday,” Michelle Obama said. “It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday
as well ... Jesus didn’t limit his ministry to the four walls of the church. He
was out there fighting injustice and speaking truth to power every single day.”
But Mrs. Obama’s words notwithstanding,
there seems to be a great deal of confusion about this point in the Western
leadership class today.
You can see this confusion at work in
the Obama White House’s own Department of Health and Human Services, which
created a religious exemption to its mandate requiring employers to pay for
contraception, sterilization and the days-after pill that covers only churches,
and treats religious hospitals, schools and charities as purely secular
operations. The defenders of the H.H.S. mandate note that it protects freedom
of worship, which indeed it does. But a genuine free exercise of religion, not
so much.
A similar spirit was at work across the
Atlantic last month, when a judge in Cologne, Germany, banned circumcision as a
violation of a newborn’s human rights. Here again, defenders of the decision
insisted that it didn’t trample on any Jew’s or Muslim’s freedom of belief. But
of course to be an adult Jew in good standing, as The Washington Post’s Charles
Lane pointed out, one must circumcise one’s
son at 8 days old. So while the ruling would not technically outlaw
Jewish theology or Jewish worship, it would effectively outlaw Judaism itself.
Now we have the great Chick-fil-A
imbroglio, in which mayors and an alderman in several American cities
threatened to prevent the delicious chicken chain from opening new outlets
because its Christian president told an interviewer that he supports “the biblical
definition of the family unit.” Their conceit seemed to be that the religious
liberties afforded to congregations (no official, to my knowledge, has
threatened to close down any Chicago churches) do not extend to religious
businessmen. Or alternatively, it was that while a businessman may have the
right to his private beliefs, the local zoning committee has veto power over
how those beliefs are exercised and expressed.
I have described all these incidents as
resulting from confusion about what freedom of religion actually entails. But
of course every freedom has its limits. We do not allow people to exercise
beliefs that require, say, forced marriage or honor killing. You can believe in
the gods of 15th-century Mesoamerica, but neither Chicago values nor American
ones permit the use of Aztec sacrificial altars on the South Side.
To the extent that the H.H.S. mandate,
the Cologne ruling and the Chick-fil-A controversy reflect a common logic
rather than a shared confusion, then, it’s a logic that regards Western
monotheism’s ideas about human sexuality — all that chastity, monogamy,
male-female business — as similarly incompatible with basic modern freedoms.
Like a belief that the gods want human
sacrifice, these ideas are permissible if held in private. But they cannot be
exercised in ways that might deny, say, employer-provided sterilizations to
people who really don’t want kids. Nor can they be exercised to deny one’s
offspring the kind of sexual gratification that anti-circumcision advocates
claim the procedure makes impossible. They certainly cannot be exercised in
ways that might make anyone uncomfortable with his or her own sexual choices or
identity.
It may seem strange that anyone could
look around the pornography-saturated, fertility-challenged,
family-breakdown-plagued West and see a society menaced by a repressive puritanism.
But it’s clear that this perspective is widely and sincerely held.
It would be refreshing, though, if it
were expressed honestly, without the “of course we respect religious freedom”
facade.
If you want to fine Catholic hospitals
for following Catholic teaching, or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising
their sons, or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston, then don’t tell religious people that
you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our
religion threatens all that’s good and decent, and that you’re going to use the
levers of power to bend us to your will.
There, didn’t that feel better? Now we
can get on with the fight.
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